


Is it?

by orphan_account



Category: Tortall - Tamora Pierce
Genre: Crazy, Memories, Other, Post-War, frightened, mentally ill, scared
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-16
Updated: 2011-07-16
Packaged: 2017-10-21 10:56:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/224417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>And Dove's daughter is in a riot and Mequen is dead with a gash to the stomach and Junim drowns at sea, only they didn't, they won't, and they aren't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Is it?

Dove’s daughter is a day old and Winna sits in a chair, trying to rock her to sleep – but she’s a very quiet baby, very self contained – when she panics.

 _What’s that?_ She realizes, looking at the baby’s thin arms, pushing up the sleeves on the gown. _What’s that?_

But it’s there, the long white scar running down her arm. Winna runs her hand over it, feeling the raised skin from some scar Dove picked up in the battle – but is she remembering, or is it there?

 _(Is it there? Really?)_

“No, sweetheart,” she whispers. “You can’t be in any wars, we’ll keep you safe, I promise-”

Her voice breaks off.

This isn’t Dove.

It’s her daughter.

No scars.

 _Not yet._

She exhales the deep breath she didn’t realize that she had been holding, and fights the urge to scream.

 _(Am I going insane?)_

 _***_

The hallucinations, the flashes that are there but not quite- they continue. At six, Junim, out for a day at sea, drowns and they can never find the body; at twelve, her granddaughter gets caught in a riot; at twenty three, Sarai comes to visit, goes for a moonlit ride on her horse, and never comes back.

Only-

They _haven’t._

 _(Have I? Have they?)_

Winna knows it – she’s sure she does, but sometimes it slips and she sits in the sun and fights the urge to scream. 

***

And Mequen, now a man, comes back to Isles, and of course he wants to be a rider like his mother.

But something goes _wrong,_ horribly _wrong-_

Mequen’s chest is gashed from a bad fall and he lays still and pale on the healing room bed. It’s so easy not to see the bed in the healing rooms, but a cold floor on the plains of Lombyn, a body crumpled to the ground at the age of forty (nineteen) years. Somehow, it’s so easy to imagine Mequen-

As Mequen.

 _(Somebody? Anybody?)_

 _***_

And Dove’s daughter is sixteen and the queen-to-be and she likes to look at maps and talk about the silk exchange, except she spends too much time giving money to beggars and she’s stitched an open shackle symbol on her clothing and _why is she in the palace when the Rittevons are trying to get her, trying to kill her-_

 _(Are they?)_

That one is so strong she runs away from a state dinner so she can scream in the garden where no one will hear her.

“I think I’m going insane,” she whispers, but there’s a stirring and Nawat steps out.

“I don’t think so,” he says, and Winna thinks that maybe he knows because he has dark circles under his eyes.

But his face is twisted in pain because he took an arrow on Malebusang and he’s flying as a crow and Aly is crying when she thinks no one can see her-

But he _isn’t._ _She isn’t._

He’s just Nawat and she’s just Winna, and finally, for the first time in so long, she remembers. 


End file.
